* SOA is in fact motoring forward. Among the survey respondents, 49% said their organization has one or more SOA projects under way, and 60% characterize their current or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to departmental/divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%).

* Interest and uptick in Business Process Management with 29.7% of respondents marking BPM as one of the critical areas for their organization's technology efforts. At the same time, 35.8% respondents counted Business Process Management software among the types of infrastructure software currently used, with 38% planning to use it in the future.

* Grid/cloud software is now used by 17% of respondents, with 38% planning to use grid/cloud in the future.

I am so excited! Coming to the East Coast — live — a Social Media Tweetup! We had one in the Valley — that was so energizing but being an East Coast girl, we must try one here!

Every day companies are devising innovative techniques to leverage Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Lotus Connections, WebSphere Commerce, iLog Visualization and other Social Media technologies to develop deeper customer connections. And I see that many many countries are getting more and more interested in Social Media — like India, Brazil, and others

Many of you, have stories about ways you have deployed Social Media tactics to successfully drive demand. And I want to hear about them! I love social media and if you share that passion and quest for Business Savy in measuring it for great business value.

f you do, please plan to share in a casual conversation, Social Media Tweetup, hosted by Sandy Carter, VP of Marketing for IBM’s SOA and Jeremiah Owyang, a Senior analyst for Forrester.

This event will be held in Mid Town Manhattan on Monday, March 23 from 6 - 8 PM. We are limited to 30 attendees so please RSVP quickly

Work Smarter, Take Out Costs In a Tough Economylast week, there was a common thread emerging from conversations with customers. How do we work smarter in today’s economy to survive and thrive without going extinct? IBM’s vision for a Smarter Planet is based on how much smarter the world has become with all the technology that exists today. We are more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent. This smart is embedded and applies to people, to industries, to companies and countries.

You may have heard my analogy of the cheetah and chipmunk (entire transcript

herethanks to @joemckendrick). The fastest animal is in danger of going extinct despite its speed but the cartoonish chipmunk has adapted to its environment due to its agility and ability to adapt to a changing environment.

Joe’s excellent post on

Time to get bullish on SOA, IT and the economy drives the point home where he states “Times of turmoil always equate to times of new opportunity. As I’ve said before time and again, the current rough-and-tumble economy is really a time for SOA — and information technology in general — to shine, to prove their mettle.” @monkchips also expands the viewpoint stating that “soa isn’t about cost cutting, it is a growth engine”

I want to elaborate further on why we believe that service orientation really is the key to agility and cost optimization. By extracting services from your applications, putting those business services in a reusable format, it allows you to quickly change, based on what's happening in the environment, or to invoke change yourself on the industry. It allows you to flexibly connect information, because you isolate the business logic from the underpinning IT and you can reuse.. not just the IT assets, but the business assets as well.

This allows you to unlock the power of your business resources, as well as your IT resources. And provide agility and cost optimization.

How do you measure agility? You can run through our key agility indicators, KAIs. If you're going to focus on agility, you need to be able to measure it. Like our customer, Ralph Warchol at Clayton Homes who emphasizes the importance of business stakeholder buy in and states on the Global Virtual Forum “if you can’t measure it, how can you manage it.”

As @dortchonit nicely sums it up, “Yeah, it's hard work. But if you want to run a truly agile, intelligent, and successful business, it's work worth doing. And the alternatives are harder, I promise." More coverage on Michael’s blog